At Sector67 we have a laser cutter, and it uses laser tubes of special glass and special gases inside, and after a couple thousand hours of use it will eventually die. The gases aren’t really changeable, and even if they were it would be expensive to do. Over the more than decade of owning the…
Category: Personal Projects
Elf Training
If you want to watch a video presentation I gave on this topic for the Sector67 monthly meeting, it’s available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKcOTcaCISQ I went way overboard this year for Christmas and spent a LONG time building an experience for someone. The 7 year old that lives in the house REALLY wants to see Santa, and…
Halloween Tron Costume
The movie Tron: Ares released recently, and we watched Tron: Legacy in advance to pump ourselves up, then went out to see Ares in theaters. I really liked it, and thought the costumes, music, sets, and action were great. It’s sad to me that Tron movies do so poorly in the box office. Laura and…
Recovering a Water Bottle
I have a soft spot for reusable water bottles. I had my Nalgene for 13 years before it died on a marble floor. I could not resuscitate it with heat or adhesives, and had to replace it. So when I was given a water bottle that clearly had a lot of sentimental value but a…
Heat Pump Water Heater Installation
In the endless effort to improve the home’s efficiency and reduce contributions to climate change, I took on replacing the water heater with a heat pump water heater. There were a few reasons for this, and the stars aligned to make it happen. There’s a lot of hype about heat pump water heaters. They’re super…
Bibimbob
Yes, I know it’s actually bibimbap, but I’m Bob, so get over it. This dish usually takes me 3o minutes to prepare, but on your first time you should budget an hour. It’s sort of like a salad on rice, so you can choose which goodies to use. In advance (or first thing), I take…
Do Treehouses Need Permits?
The short answer, as far as I can tell, is no. And the neighborhood seems surprisingly cool and impressed with it. I looked at the city websites to do some diligence, but the closest I could find was a deck or a shed. Decks have certain accessibility requirements that are not possible in a treehouse,…
Installing Solar
I installed a 4kW solar array.
Competitive Jigsaw Puzzling
In December I started doing competitive jigsaw puzzling. This is a sport where people are all given the same puzzle, and none of them know what it is before the competition starts. At the same time, everyone opens the puzzle and it’s a race to be the first to complete it. Categories include individual 500…
Building My Bed
Since moving in, I had planned to have a Murphy bed, and style it in the same theme as the rest of the room; spacey without any specific branding. Here are the after photos. Continue on for the full process. To start, I modeled it in CAD, and here are some renders: When I purchased…